2011-10-30 - OWS Turns to Pedal Power - The Raw Story

The Occupy Wall Street protesters who were left without power after their gas-fueled generators were confiscated by New York City authorities on Friday may have found the idea solution in the form of a stationary bicycle hooked up to charge batteries.

Stephan Keegan of the non-profit environmental group Time’s Up showed off one of the bikes to The Daily News, explaining that OWS’s General Assembly has already authorized payment for additional bikes and that “soon we’ll have ten of these set up and we’ll be powering the whole park with batteries.”

Protester Lauren Minis told CBS New York, “We’ve got five bike-powered generator systems that are coming from Boston and we’ve got five more plus other ones that are going to supplement as well so we’re completely, completely off the grid.”

According to CBS, “Insiders at Occupy Wall Street say they expect to have their media center and the food service area fully powered and illuminated by Monday.”

“We need some exercise,” Keegan explained enthusiastically, “and we’ve got a lot of volunteers, so we should be able to power these, no problem. … We did an energy survey of the whole park, found out how much energy we were using. …. Ten will give us twice as much power.”

Keegan also boasted that the system is “very clean” and is environmentally superior not only to fossil fuel but even to solar panels, because it uses almost entirely recycled materials.